all things.

If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily
have forgiven him--for the excesses of charity are the extensions of
hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a
hundred times. This is the impression he makes on universalists of all
creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole
round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final
judges of sovereign pretension. It is very well for individuals to
make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or
pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be;
and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the
very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius
of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of
unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would
spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version
of _Ugolino_). Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso,
and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into
the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "_take upon
themselves to know" (Cymbeline_, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet
to Henry Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine"--a lamenting epithet,
by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. The
historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of
Milton, says that "Hell grows darker at his frown." [26]

Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He tells
Miss Seward that the "plan" of the poem appeared to him "unhappy;
the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and
uninteresting." [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider
it. The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and